The problem with most tech positions is that there is a limit on what you can earn. Bill rates and returns on individual contributor or even team lead roles is only so much. What happens is that people in their mid-30s get the experience and understand the business and the industry well enough to move on to something else. They get tired of being on call. Get tired of the development cycle grind. Get tired of trying to keep up with tech while also having a life. So they move on to management, sales or other roles where they make more, and often, work less. It's a decision many people have to make at some point in the career.

Macs are no longer limited to graphics artists and web designers. While that market may not be what it was for Apple it's being more than made up for in other areas. I'm a Data Center Architect and use nothing but Macs. Cisco, EMC, and VMware now offer Macs as standard offerings for their SEs and field people and last I heard Cisco had gone 30% Mac in just a few months. It's rare I'm in a meeting with those guys where Mac is not the majority.

Pushing away professionals? Hardly. Nice link bait.

It does very little to the battery. It scales up in speed as needed and then back down to like 192MHz when idle. Mine is at 1.7GHz and battery has been just fine. After tweaks and OC it's not bad at all...especially for $149. Good enough that I sold my iPad 1.

Link to an easy walkthrough I did on tweaking the Touchpad:

http://jasonnash.com/2011/09/05/tweaking-that-new-hp-touchpad-you-just-got/

That's why I say sometimes I can't. But often I can install Prezi on it..just depends.

If you can help it, stop using PowerPoint. I do a lot of user group and technology evangelization presentations and I'm doing my best to stop using PP. Sometimes I don't have a choice as I can't control the presentation system (large presentations like VMworld, for example). But when I can I'm using Prezi. It really breaks you out of that bullet point process. You throw your talking points and ideas out on a "canvas" and build your thoughts from there. After making the move I've gotten a LOT of positive feedback on it. Even if you can't use Prezi you can get out of bullet points. When having to use PP I stick to a "conversational" style presentation. Very few bullet points and statements, graphics, simple sentences, etc. The slide is about a thought, not a list of points.

Thanks for the review. I'll grab a copy of this as well.

It's a little early to call the death of FCoE. We still can't really do a true FCoE environment. The firmware to enable multi-hop FCoE on switches is just now starting to ship. Up to now all we've done is single-hop where the storage is directly connected to the same switch as the end devices...which is not scalable. I have a lot of customers doing 10Gb NFS (I do a lot of VMware) but for true high performance the choice is still Fibre Channel and those same customers are the ones looking heavily at FCoE.

Slow to hire? I know a number of companies that still can't find people. It's all about your skillset right now. If you're in the Carolinas and know VMware and/or Storage and/or Cisco Data Center Networking you need to email me. I need people ASAP.

Many employees worry about WebSense and other logging apps but in my experience, those apps aren't what gets you in to trouble. I've never seen an investigation start with the logs...but I have seen a couple of senior execs fall after the board started an inquiry in to some internal financial issues and the investigators found porn on the execs computers. As soon as they find out they go pull the web logs and then things spiral. So often these logs aren't really the target of the investigators, but if they're looking for something else they sure can hang you. Like I said, I've seen a few people get taken down for things like this when the actual investigation found they did nothing wrong.

So be careful. Don't be an idiot. Don't be the CEO looking at porn at work when you can do it at home. It just doesn't make sense. What's sad is I'm sure some of these guys look at porn at work because their wife gets mad at home. Nice job honey. :)

Trade schools exist...they are just Community College now. You can go to a CC and become a certified welder or pipe fitter. The problem is that CC has an unwarrented stigma attached to it. So it's seen as a "Oh..he went to Community College...oh well.".

Yes, some of us do. I'm using a 27" iMac right now with one. My MacBook Pro also has a glossy screen. I probably use the combination of these two devices 10 or 12 hours per day, or more. Most of my time is spent indoors when working but I use it outdoors as well. Not a perfect solution but just get an anti-glare cover for the screen. Use that outside and take it off inside.

I'm sure that's the case for some people, but when there are iPads EVERYWHERE amongst 12K network guys at a show like this, that tells you something and it's more than marketing. I have seen exactly one non-iPad tablet in the last 3 days at Cisco Live and that was an older Windows tablet. Poor guy. But if you choose to believe it's all marketing, go for it..but it's not. Same reason I carry an iPhone 4 right now. I looked at the Droid, EVO, and others before I bought this new one. No one had the usability of it. I use my phone and my iPad every single day. I don't care I can't run a web server on it, that's not my use case. I don't care that I have to go through the app store (in most cases), the tradeoff is well worth it.

Cisco doesn't care because Cisco isn't competing directly with Apple here. This is a device that fits in with the rest of their VoIP/Video device offerings. I bet a lot of what it can do will also be available for the iPad, when v2 hits with a camera. So you can use the Cius and dock it with a Cisco VoIP phone or load an app on an iPad that you manage yourself.

This is not an iPad killer. It's not meant to be one. I'm at Cisco Live right now and all the Cisco geeks are wetting themselves over it...but it's not even a competitor to the iPad. It's a niche product to work with Cisco's other technologies. Hospitals are going nuts over the iPad and Cisco wants a play in that market. They want these customers to buy the Cius just like they do Cisco wireless handsets now. Look at the promo pics, it's docked in a Cisco phone.

Different markets.

No. I'm buying an experience. I just used my iPad at Cisco Live all day. It worked great..it's exactly what I bought it for. I've owned other tablet devices and they sucked. The current Android offerings do the same. Right now there is no better OVERALL PACKAGE in tablet form than the iPad. Sure, it may not have 8 USB ports or 3 SD slots, but it works really damn well and that's what people want. Geeks want speeds and feeds, users want a tool that just works.